The GOALden Window: How We Turned World Cup Data Into a Beer Mat Every Pub in the UK Needed
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When Access Hospitality came to us with a challenge, it wasn't your typical B2B ask. They needed to get in front of pub owners and hospitality decision-makers, while also building consumer brand awareness, during the single biggest live sporting event on the planet: the World Cup.
Oh, and they needed it live before kick-off.
The Brief
How do you cut through to a B2B audience of pub owners and hospitality operators, while simultaneously landing consumer brand awareness, during the busiest, most chaotic period of the football calendar?
Our answer: give the punters something genuinely useful, and give the pubs something they'd want on every table.
The Insight
Every football fan knows the half-time scramble. The final whistle of the first half blows and suddenly the entire pub is on its feet, elbows out, racing the bar queue before kick-off two. For pub owners, that rush isn't just chaos; it's lost revenue, stretched staff, and grumpy customers who missed a goal because they were queuing for a pint.
So we asked a simple question: When is it actually safe to go to the bar without missing a goal?
To answer it properly, our data analysts didn't guess; they went right back to the source. We analysed every single World Cup goal scored since the tournament began in 1930, mapped by the exact minute it went in, to identify the genuine "GOALden Windows", the minutes in a match when goals are least likely to be scored, and the danger zones when you really shouldn't leave your seat.
The Idea: The GOALden Window
Working alongside Design My Night and Access Hospitality, we turned that data into The GOALden Window, a beer mat campaign built entirely around one killer stat: the exact minute to head to the bar without missing a goal.
Each mat broke the match down into three simple, scannable calls:
✅ Head to the bar — the safest windows to get a round in (5–10, 19–25, 56–60, 86–87 minutes)
⚠️ Check the queue — proceed with caution (17–18, 67–71 minutes)
❌ Stay in your seat — the highest-risk goal windows of the match (43–45, 80–85, 88–90 minutes)
And the standout stat that anchored the whole campaign: the 75th minute is statistically the worst time to leave your seat, with 45 goals scored in the 75th minute alone since 1930.
Simple, visual, instantly useful, exactly the kind of practical value that gets picked up, read, and talked about at the table.
Getting It Out There
For the B2B audience, it demonstrated exactly the kind of sharp, commercially-minded thinking hospitality brands want from a data partner. For consumers, it turned a beer mat into a talking point, genuinely useful, shareable content sitting on tables in pubs the length of the country.
Did It Work?
So far, the data's holding up. Every goal scored in the tournament since launch has landed outside the GOALden Windows, meaning fans following the mats haven't missed a single one.
The Team
A brilliant example of what happens when data, speed, and a genuinely useful idea come together. Huge credit to the team at Rise at Seven and Access Group for turning this around at pace and getting it into pubs before a ball was even kicked.
